The Roommate

The Roommate was a much better movie when it starred Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh and was called Single White Female. It's not that The Roommate is aggressively awful--it's somewhat competent in execution, though largely devoid of suspense--it's greatest crime is it's complete irrelevancy. It has no reason to exist.

Minka Kelly (who, at 31, is a little old for such a part) plays a college freshman who has just moved into her room at a thinly veiled UCLA (it's called the University of Los Angeles, but what other college is on Sunset Boulevard?) After a night of partying she meets her roommate, the shy, pretty and polite Leighton Meester (at 25, a little more age-appropriate). Things seem great at first, as Meester couldn't be nicer, but of course everything will go terribly wrong.

It starts with Meester becoming possessive of Kelly, coveting her friendship and protecting her from bad influences. She assaults Kelly's hard-partying friend (Aly Michalka) by ripping out her belly-button ring, then sets up a professor (Billy Zane) in a sexual harassment rap. Best unsaid is what she does to Kelly's kitten. Kelly is oblivious at first, but when she realizes Meester is not taking her psychotropic drugs, she decides to move out, but not before Meester escalates the violence.

The similarities to Single White Female are striking, right down to the heroine being a fashion designer, to a boyfriend being killed with a sharp object (a box cutter replaces a stiletto). It was directed by Christian E. Christiansen, a Danish director who was nominated for an Oscar for a live-action short. I haven't seen that film, but I'm assuming it was inventive and original, and it's sad to think his entry into Hollywood was to make this derivative piece of nonsense. Here's a lesson to up-and-coming filmmakers--don't take anything they offer you. The Roommate may have set him back in his career (although it did make 40 million at the box office).

I will say this--the more I see of Leighton Meester the more impressed I am with her. She turns a cliched role into something interesting--I bought her completely in this movie. She has the potential to be a very interesting actress; I just hope she gets better material.